White House mum on whether recent Al Qaeda threat extends to U.S. homeland

The White House would not say directly Monday whether it believes the U.S. homeland is a potential target of the suspected Al Qaeda plot which led to the closure of American embassies in much of the Muslim world this week.

The “threat is emanating from and may be directed towards the Arabian peninsula, but it is beyond that potentially,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said amid a flurry of questions about the degree of threat on U.S. soil.

During his daily briefing, Carney seemed wary of ruling out an attack on U.S. soil, lest one happen and the White House be seen as unprepared. But he gave no indication that officials are particularly concerned about the U.S. homeland in connection with the suspected plot that led to the embassy closures and a worldwide travel caution.

That was a somewhat different tack than that taken Monday by a State Department spokeswoman, who when asked about the further closings, spoke of officials evaluating new information.

“We continue to refine our assessment of the threat. We do, you can imagine, get new information and as we do so we’ll evaluate our security needs going forward,” State Deputy Spokeswoman Marie Harf said at a briefing there.

Carney also defended President Barack Obama against claims that during last year’s election, he overstated the administration’s success in rolling back the terrorist threat.

Fox News’s Ed Henry noted that Obama frequently declared on the stump: “Al Qaeda is on the run and Osama bin Laden is dead.

Henry and Carney did not disagree about bin Laden's demise, but about how directly the president communicated that Al Qaeda had metastasized, rather than fading away completely.

“We have been clear and the president has been clear that the threat from Al Qaeda very much remains,” Carney said.

“He rarely had those caveats,” Henry insisted.

“That’s just not true,” Carney maintained, before recasting the president’s punchy campaign-trail mantra in this somewhat-less-punchy way: “Al Qaeda core in the Af-Pak region has been greatly diminished and is on the run.”